Tea and Dog Biscuits (11 page)

‘Peter can't bring himself to clear up poo if he spots any in the grass. And he's terrified I'll miss it when I go round clearing up. He used to come indoors and go into this big explanation about where I could find it.'

I put down my biscuit.

‘He'd give me all these directions. He'd say, “It's about ten paces from the shed, looking towards the garage.”'

She turned to me. ‘Dorothy says you're another man squeamish about poo, Barrie.'

I felt this wasn't entirely fair.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I don't wake up of a morning and think, Oh good, today's the day I'm going to go round the garden picking up poo.'

‘Peter was giving me such complicated directions one day,' Cecilia went on, ‘I said to him, “Why don't you draw me a map?” And he did!'

I looked across at Dorothy. I liked it when Cecilia talked about her husband, Peter; it made me seem more normal.

‘Of course, I hadn't meant it seriously – I was being sarcastic – but sarcasm is wasted on my dear husband.'

‘If you're like us,' said Dorothy, ‘you spend a lot of your life peering at poo.'

‘Well, you have to,' agreed Cecilia enthusiastically, ‘if only to see if they've got diarrhoea.'

‘Or if you are over-feeding them,' added Dorothy. ‘Our vet says if it's a nice solid poo it's probably the right amount of food, but you might be over-feeding if the poo's soft at the end.'

‘Oh, that's worth remembering,' said Cecilia.

I leant forward so that I was between the pair of them. ‘I'm trying to have a cup of tea and a biscuit here!' I said.

‘Just let me tell you about Peter's new system,' said Cecilia, ‘then I won't say any more about poo.'

I sighed and gave up. In a battle of wills between me and Cecilia, I always lost.

‘He cut up some of his gardening canes and stuck bits of paper on the ends to make little flags.'

I looked at Dorothy again. Her mouth hung open.

‘I'm not joking – when he goes out gardening, if he spots a poo he puts one of these little flags by it. Some days the garden's covered in them.'

Reluctant as I was to miss hearing about the idiosyncrasies of Cecilia's husband, I heard the sound of wheels crunching on gravel, and went to investigate. On the driveway sat a police car. PC Charlie Morecambe had by now become quite a regular visitor. This dog handler without a dog seemed to have time on his hands. And as a devotee of German Shepherd dogs – something we had in common – our place was like a magnet for him. The first couple of times he called round it was on the pretext of walking a dog to help us but last visit he had come clean and admitted he was just popping in to see if we'd got anything new.

‘I've brought you some doggy food,' he said this time. I saw that cardboard boxes were stacked up to the roof on the car's passenger seats. ‘There's more in the boot.'

‘Blimey, Charlie, we couldn't afford this stuff.' It was tins of premium brand food. Twenty-four tins to a box and there were boxes and boxes of them. Charlie was already stacking them up on the porch.

‘This is great, Charlie,' I said. ‘It must have cost you a fortune.'

‘Nah.' He took a break from carting the boxes. He unbuttoned the flap on his tunic's top pocket. I knew what was coming next: the Golden Virginia.

‘You've already paid for it,' he said.

I shook my head. What was he talking about?

‘In your taxes.' He coughed a few times then spread tobacco out on a cigarette paper. ‘Our dog unit hadn't used up its budget for the year and if you don't spend it the brass cut it next year, so we used up all the money left on dog food.' He ran his tongue along the cigarette paper and went on to roll the slimmest cigarette I had ever seen. He wouldn't take his doctor's advice and give up cigarettes but had set himself a limit of making half an ounce of tobacco last a month.

He puffed on his roll-up while I unloaded.

‘We've got a new skipper,' he said, halfway down the cigarette.

‘Oh yeah. Any good?'

‘How could he be any good?' He flipped some ash away. ‘No one with anything about ‘em or any sort of ambition would let themselves get shoved off into a backwater like the dog unit.'

I paused in my work. Our love and admiration for German Shepherds gave this policeman and me a common bond. Perhaps it was this that made him so astonishingly frank about life in the police force. Whatever the cause, his indiscreet revelations were very enjoyable for a member of the public.

‘I think this one is going to be worse than the last. He hasn't even got a doggy at home. Mind you, he does keep exotic fish. I expect that's what the brass thought would qualify him to be in charge of the dog unit.'

I shook my head in wonder.

‘It's thanks to him coming you've got this lot,' he said, nodding towards the boxes of dog food stacked up. ‘A new skipper might notice all this dog food and wonder how every dog eats sixteen tins a day.'

Now four of us were seated round the kitchen table, drinking tea and munching chocolate digestives. Charlie's visit had been rewarded; there was a new dog for him to meet. ‘What a cracker!' had been his opinion of the Lion-Maned Dog. And he repeated it now when Cecilia asked him what he thought.

‘He's a cracker!' He turned to me and winked. ‘You sure he's not nine months, Barrie? I'll have him like a shot.'

‘Don't you think your new skipper would notice the grey on his muzzle?' I said.

Dorothy held out the plate of chocolate digestives. ‘Up to what age can you take dogs?' she asked.

Charlie took a biscuit and broke it in two, dropping crumbs down his tunic.

‘We're only supposed to take them up to eighteen months but if one of the lads comes across a nice one we often shave something off their mileage. My last boy, Digby, he was three when I took him. Not that you'd have known it.' He paused. ‘That boy out there reminds me of him a bit. In fact, more than a bit.'

He looked away from the rest of us to stare at his teacup. His mood had changed suddenly.

‘Fancy them not giving him a name,' he said quietly, more to himself. But the rest of us also paused to reflect on that.

Cecilia broke the sombre silence. ‘We were talking about poo before you came in, PC Morecambe.'

‘Oh yes, as you do. Call me Charlie – I'm not on duty now.'

Dorothy turned to him. ‘We were talking about how much of our time we spend looking at their motions, as it tells you quite a lot, doesn't it?'

Charlie nodded and forced a smile. Then he turned to me. ‘What are you going to call him?'

I looked across at Dorothy. ‘We did talk about it while we were bathing him, didn't we? We came up with quite a lot of names but there was nothing we really liked.'

‘It's hard, isn't it?' said Cecilia. ‘I've had to do it with strays.' She looked at Charlie. ‘My husband's a museum curator and loves history. He always wants to call them after famous people from the past. He wanted to call a Yorkie Churchill.'

‘Barrie and I couldn't agree on a name,' said Dorothy. ‘Everything I came up with he pulled a face.'

‘Well, you didn't like any of mine,' I said in my defence.

‘What about Digby?' said Charlie.

This produced a pause.

Dorothy and I looked at each other across the kitchen table.

‘Perfect,' she said.

It had been Dorothy's suggestion that we should hold a naming ceremony.

‘I don't think we should just start calling him by a new name,' she had said. ‘This marks a new beginning for him – the start of his new life. A new name for a new life. We should do something to signify that.'

A naming ceremony? At first I was rather unsure. Then I could see the idea was typical of Dorothy: a thoughtful suggestion, something nice to do, rather different, probably not an idea most people would have thought of.

Cecilia was a maverick character and the more I saw of Charlie the more I began to suspect he was too. In keeping with their characters they both greeted Dorothy's suggestion with enthusiasm.

Thus it was that we four had adjourned to the lounge, a slightly more dignified setting than the kitchen. Lion-Maned Dog had been released from his temporary pen in the utility room, had strode into the lounge as if he owned the place and with his tail immediately knocked the remote control off the arm of the settee onto the floor, batteries spilling out the back.

‘Now there's a German Shepherd trait,' said Charlie. ‘He's clumsy.'

Other items would be at risk from a clumsy big tail-wagging dog. While I moved these to a place of safety, Dorothy found pen and paper and came up with the wording for our short ceremony. I liked what she had written. ‘Who's going to make the pronouncement?' I asked.

Dorothy looked across at me. ‘We haven't got the authority to do this sort of thing – I think Charlie should do it,' she said, turning to him.

Surprise registered on Charlie's face. He hesitated before speaking. ‘No, it was you three who rescued him. It should be one of you.'

But I studied his face and I thought Charlie was rather pleased at the suggestion. I looked at Dorothy and then at Cecilia. ‘Let's have a show of hands,' I said. ‘All those in favour.'

Three hands shot up in the air. Charlie smiled. Meanwhile, Lion-Maned Dog had been going through the waste-paper bin and had found some paper that had been screwed up into a ball: he was nosing it around the carpet. Charlie picked the ball of paper up and held it aloft. Lion-Maned Dog fixed his eyes on him.

‘Sit!' said Charlie.

It was the first time I had heard him use such a firm, authoritative tone of voice. Lion-Maned Dog sat. Charlie put a hand in a pocket of his tunic and brought out a little white paper bag. Lion-Maned Dog's gaze moved from the paper ball to the paper bag. Charlie dropped the paper ball onto the floor and took out of the bag what I guessed was some tasty morsel, which he held up with his right hand.

He looked down at Lion-Maned Dog and fixed him with a steady gaze. He cleared his throat.

‘By authority vested in me as an officer of the law,' he said in a judicial tone of voice, ‘I hereby pronounce that henceforth…'

He placed his left hand on the dog's head.

‘… you shall be known as…' He paused for a moment. The tone of voice softened.

‘… Digby.'

Digby wagged his tail. Charlie's hand was still on his head and now he rubbed that head gently.

‘And may you have a long and happy life.'

It was a dog that was a hundred years old.

He stood encircled by the vet, the assistant vet, the student vet, the nurse, the trainee nurse and the receptionist.

‘How could anybody do that to him?' said the receptionist.

For a few moments everybody gazed at him in compassionate disbelief. Then our vet's professional instincts reasserted themselves. ‘Bring him through,' Melissa said.

‘Come on then,' I said to him and patted my leg. It was an effort, but one step at a time he made his way into the consulting room.

‘What's his name?' the receptionist called after me. I turned, looked at her and shrugged my shoulders.

‘Let's get him up on the table,' said Melissa. We had not had from her the usual, friendly, ‘Hi, how are you doing?' None of us were in the mood for a cheerful greeting.

Dorothy and I both bent down to pick him up. ‘With what he weighs I can manage him on my own,' I said. I put my arms around him. It was like gathering up a framework of bones. ‘Come on, lad. Up we go!'

There was no resistance to this stranger scooping him up. Gently, I let him down onto the table. His head hung low. He took no interest in me, Dorothy, Melissa or what was going on. Either he felt too unwell or hadn't got the strength. Or perhaps he was just past caring.

Melissa gently raised his head then pushed back the skin round his eyes so she could check for whatever it is vets check for when they do that. ‘What do you know about him?' she asked.

‘A young chap brought him to us last night,' said Dorothy. ‘He rang and said he'd found a German Shepherd dog.'

Melissa was shaking a thermometer. ‘Had he found him, do you think, or was it really his dog?'

That question took me aback momentarily. It hadn't occurred to me that the young man might not be telling the truth, that it might be his own dog. It struck me that the question displayed Melissa's greater experience of dealing with people and their dogs. Yet as Melissa examined the dog I thought it over and felt sure the young man was genuine. He had seemed so shocked.

‘He was on the pavement,' he had said. ‘I was parking my car and I could see something just lying there. There was nobody about – I was looking around. It was dark but I could see how thin he was and that he was alive.'

I asked him where he'd found the dog.